Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (review)

Industrial pollution kills—but, as this angry and persuasive book makes clear, the sickness and death associated with industrial pollution are not simply the consequence of toxic chemicals in our environment, nor are they the tragic but inevitable consequences of impersonal forces such as modernization or capitalism. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner remind us that our too-toxic world is ultimately the product of choices made by individuals: managers in boardrooms, scientists in laboratories, and the unreflective practitioners of cost-benefit analysis, whether in industry or government. Time and time again, industries—no, individuals within industries—have plunged headlong into producing and marketing products of unknown danger, and have then dismissed, disregarded, or hidden those dangers as they became apparent, and sidestepped responsibility when the risks became public knowledge.

Deceit and Denial relates the history of two of the most notorious industrial pollutants of the twentieth century: lead and vinyl chloride. The two could hardly be more different in their health effects, the means by which they reached the public, and their place in the history of environmental regulation. Lead, the most ancient industrial poison, has been a fundamental component in thousands of products over the centuries, with frequently fatal results. But in the twentieth century, just two products—lead-based paint, and the gasoline additive tetraethyl lead—caused lead to become nearly ubiquitous in the American environment. In each instance the product was lead itself, marketed aggressively and promoted explicitly on the purported merits of its chemical properties. Markowitz and Rosner lay out the dramatic story of the gradual discovery of the harm caused by lead paint, the brazen disregard for public health with which leaded gasoline was introduced in the 1920s, and the lead industry's manipulation of science and its campaigns to avoid acknowledging its culpability in the century's single worst industrial assault on public health. Much of this story will be familiar to medical historians, as there is now a fairly robust historiography of lead poisoning (a historiography practically initiated by Deceit and Denial's authors' 1987 collection Dying for Work: Workers' Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America). What is new is the precision with which the authors can contrast the lead industry's public pronouncements regarding its products' harmlessness with internally expressed concerns about the costs (to the industry) of lead poisoning as a public health—or public relations—problem.

Vinyl chloride, the key ingredient in plastics, presents quite a different set of issues for historical analysis. Plastic consumer products are not hazardous in the same ways as lead paint and leaded gasoline. But the manufacture of plastics creates severe hazards whenever vinyl chloride is released into the air: inside the factory walls, where it has produced a marked rise in work-related cancers; and into the general environment, where it is implicated in increased morbidity and mortality in neighboring communities—communities, it will surprise no one familiar with environmental justice to learn, that are disproportionately poor and nonwhite. The book's section on vinyl chloride begins in the workplace and ends with enraged citizens battling not only the chemical industry but the science that often masks in precise statements of statistical uncertainty the link that community members know to exist between pollution from nearby plants and the harms their neighbors and families suffer.

Given the book's sharp and fairly even division into two parts, the disparate nature of the risks presented by lead and vinyl chloride, and their very different regulatory histories, readers might reasonably ask whether this should be one book or two. But at heart, it is less about particular poisons or their vectors than the control of knowledge about the health risks...